The human spirit is a third element, separate from the soul and body. In John 3 Jesus told Nicodemus one cannot understand His teachings without a spiritual birth -- literally "born from above" -- and the conversation which followed made it painfully obvious. Nicodemus was equivalent to a PhD. His whole education rested on ignoring that third faculty of human nature, denying it existed. For Nicodemus, everything God meant to tell humans was fully a matter of intellect and moral suasion. Jesus said such things were the gateway, an indicator of the spiritual truths which could not be put into words.
Jesus spoke in symbolic language -- water and flesh versus wind and spirit -- because the ultimate Truth from God was not a body of knowledge, but was Himself. You cannot reduce Jesus to mere principles. Your mind can only perceive and handle just so much, but like the wind, spiritual matters remain above the intellect. Jesus spoke in parables because it was the one best way to separate the spiritually alive from the dead.
It's hardly a question whether Nicodemus was morally blind or unintelligent. He clearly cared enough to interview directly the source of his confusion, and no one should underestimate his intellect or honesty and fairness of mind. There is a vast delusion in the world today which somehow mistakes higher abstract reasoning for spiritual truth. All those people claiming to possess and share mystical wisdom and insight, but who merely offer abstractions of good moral teaching, are deceiving themselves. There is no objective truth, existing of itself somewhere out there waiting for man to discover. Truth is a Person we call God.
Any effort to improve human life here is rooted in Law, not grace. Grace teaches you to escape this world, to rise above what man can know, to embrace what man cannot know (ineffable). Human nature consists of flesh, an animal form which comes equipped with appetites, and these are manifested in the mind as emotion. The soul also carries the ability to reason abstractly about things it perceives through the fleshly senses. At some point, the mind hands off to the will and decision is taken, action follows. The whole process is beset with miscalculations. But thus far, simply improving the process by making the rational mind stronger than all the emotions and other inputs does not make one spiritual.
Such a man remains spiritually dead until God, and God alone, touches him with grace and brings that spirit to life. That's what Jesus meant by "born from above" -- or as popularly translated, "born again." This was not a question of wading out into deeper water, which is simply more of the same. It was an entirely new existence, a life rooted in eternity. That requires the birth of that third faculty, that other basis of existence. The concerns of that heavenly existence are not fixing a broken world, but escaping it. Jesus made it clear that escape begins while we are here, because the only escape is satisfying the Father in Heaven you have completed His calling and mission to reveal Him.
That revelation begins by pointing out how mankind if fallen. Unlike far, far too many heretics on this planet, I take the position Paul explains all too clearly in Romans 8: Every part of human nature is fallen, to include the intellect. Nothing in man is capable of even wanting righteousness until God initiates a change for each individual soul.
Yes, we can create a reasonable explanation of how the Laws of God are the most effective way to live on this earth. There is no harm in leading broken lives into a more effective and successful way of living, which is most certainly according to God's Laws. That's what the Laws were for, and it's perfectly alright to abstract those Law Covenants (Moses and Noah) on a rational basis, providing you account for the assumptions behind them. But that raises yet another huge mistake: Almost the entirety of Western Civilization, including Western Christianity, rejects those very assumptions behind the Bible.
It's not as if the mainstream Christian theologians don't know this, or can't know this. They do know it. Check their writings and you will find an open and honest acknowledgment the Hebrew people of ancient times did not operate by the intellectual culture of the West. When they bump up against something which requires that, you see references to "orientalism" and "mysticism" to explain how this or that expression is so foreign to us. They also tend to cast it in dismissive terms, as if it were inferior to our way of viewing things today.
Nor do they fail to understand the Jewish intelligentsia drifted away from that Ancient Near Eastern mindset, because there are whole bookshelves of analysis on how the rabbinical colleges began embracing Hellenism. That pernicious philosophy, also known as Aristotelian logic, at heart is man-centered rationalism, with a pagan origin. So we have Jesus arguing with the teachers of His day, and the whole thing hinges upon His more Hebrew-ANE orientation, and a blunt rejection of the Hellenized viewpoint of His opponents. He called it "traditions of men" as opposed to the revelation of God. He talked about how that humanist epistemology became an excuse for twisting and perverting the intent of the Law of Moses, and it was this very thing which had trapped Nicodemus. It explained why not a single member of the Sanhedrin had a clue what God had commanded.
So why in the world do we see virtually every modern Christian theologian buying into the humanism of the Pharisees and Sadducees? Was it because Jesus didn't cast the debate in terms I used above? That sort of language requires working from the Hellenized rational assumptions in the first place. If I were to address this problem from the ANE viewpoint, they would be just as confused as Nicodemus.
Jesus corrected the corrupted understanding of the Law which dominated Jewish life and culture in His day. Every time He addressed the Law, He was pointing back to that ANE mystical-oriental viewpoint. He was showing the proper way to abstract the Law into principles, so that the whole Law can be reduced to: "Love God with a singular devotion to pleasing Him, and respect your fellow humans." That isn't spiritual; that's just an abstraction of the Law itself. What is spiritual is how we come by the power to carry that out.
That power is a miracle of God. It is a spirit brought to life so that God can make His Spirit live inside us. The Spirit of God does not live in our minds, but in our spirits. Our minds are extensions of the flesh and have to be trained to follow the spirit. Intelligence alone is not what distinguishes humans from the rest of Creation. All the good and useful decisions a man can make will only help him here, and leaves him as part of the animal kingdom. What distinguishes mankind from the rest of Creation is the capacity for communion with God. We ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and what did that get us? The Tree of Life remains closed to us until we pass through the flaming sword -- nice mystical, parabolic imagery -- and die to our human selves and receive from Him a living spirit which can make the crossing over into Eternity.
Jesus said it all too bluntly in John 4: "God is Spirit, and communion with Him requires a spirit and Truth." If you choke on my paraphrase here, you still suffer from the deception of the Pharisees, because that was their hang-up. "It means what it says, and it says what it means" -- a lie of Satan. Literalism is not from God. That was an obsession of a bunch of Hellenists, men with dead spirits who used mere words as a weapon to enslave others to their personal benefit, while Jesus used words to indicate something beyond words.
Proper use of words, and of Laws, is to open the gateway to the Spirit Realm. If you can embrace the Laws of God, you understand more than humans who don't. If the Law moves you to seek God, then you will surely find Him. You don't find Him in the Law, nor the words, but through the words and Laws. The Law is the path, the indicator and the parable of God's divine will. We have no quarrel with rightly teaching the Law, but only if it is viewed the way Jesus did, which requires that ANE mystical frame of reference. That viewpoint itself assumes that which is concrete is merely a symbol of what is divine. Nothing you can touch, see or name is divine; it can at best only point back to Him.
When George Barna, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, the Schullers, Joel Osteen, Norman Vincent Peale, and that ilk teach good and successful living for this age, we have no quarrel with it. When they call this the gospel of Jesus Christ, we call them blasphemers. They have no clue about Jesus. They are twice removed from His teaching, first by Western rationalism, second by emphasizing human choice. When they organize their churches around this pattern for success, we have no quarrel with how that works. When they say this is what Jesus commanded, we call them blasphemers. Blasphemy is defaming God, either by bringing Him down to a human level, or by elevating something fallen up to His level.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is not fixing bent humans, but giving life to dead ones. His death on the Cross was the blood price for escaping eternal damnation, not human discomfort. We who have been given this gift of life manifest it by doing things which make sense from the divine perspective, and typically make no sense from the human perspective. This business of faith -- loyalty to God -- must show something which humans cannot grasp or accomplish on their own. Otherwise, we have not revealed God at all. He reveals Himself in our other-worldly conduct, using it in some indefinable way as the atmosphere in which He invades the souls He chooses, when He chooses, rather like Paul on the Damascus Road. Not in the high drama, but in the simple truth Paul could not, would not and did not choose God; God chose him. So it is with every soul born from above.
Decision theology is a heresy. It makes good psychology, and it does make the world a better place. That's what the Law Covenants offered, and it lies entirely within human capacity to embrace it purely out of self-interest. Get enough people under that, and life is very good, but only if it assumes the ANE epistemology. Virtually every element of Western Civilization is contrary to the Bible, and that includes Western Christianity.
Change Western Christianity to ANE Christianity, and we are in a good starting place. But the final aim is to rise above this world by the drawing of His Spirit into His presence above.
Where's your focus?
If you lack spiritual awareness, your best hope is embracing a full understanding of the Laws of God. Your concerns will be gaining shalom under the Law: social stability, reasonable prosperity, security and health. Those are God's promises.
But they are simply tools for those with a spiritual awareness. People who focus on the Spirit Realm see all Creation is merely a tool. They understand the Laws of God even better than those without a spiritual awareness, because they understand them as pointers, indicators, parables of higher truths. Thus, living by the Spirit will find you often not obeying the best principles of the Laws.
Yet, there will be a large overlap between the two. They are relatively close, versus the huge difference between them as a whole against mere human-centered thinking a living. While not precisely equivalent, the whole of Western Civilization reflects that very humanistic frame of reference. Compare that with the very revelation-centered civilization of ancient Hebrew culture. That's because Hebrew culture on the earthly level was itself a parable of what all mankind seeks -- consciously or not -- in returning to our natural communion with God.
The overlap between Law and Spirit is most obvious when we consider the meaning of Christian leadership. In the church body, we must organize. God's original plan was for the church to coalesce into a large family unit. Not just in terms, calling each other "brother" or "sister," but in the actual nature of interaction and organization as an extended household. If your church ain't tribal, it ain't what Jesus had in mind.
The First Church in the Bible understood the natural division of labor between those who led spiritually (pastors) and those who led organizationally (elders). It wasn't necessary to lock folks into either category in terms of titles and function as we do in the West. It was more a matter of role, of calling from God. Elders were kings (warlord) and pastors were priests (shaman), but only in the most primitive ANE sense, and not at all in the Medieval sense which grips us in the West.
ANE leaders could function across the role division without hesitation because God wanted it that way, at least for that moment. Pastors would clearly understand the tasks they should avoid, even if they had to take the reins at times, just as the Apostles refused to get involved in food distribution. That was an organizational task, even if it did require a very sensitive spirit. These seven men were not the only ones doing that job. The local Judean folks already had their own elders, who arose naturally from the reflexive behavior of the Judean Christians as they formed their new clans and tribes under Christ. Those "Hellenist" Jews who were raised in various Gentile lands lacked that reflexive community habit. Thus, the Apostles instructed the church to pick out Hellenized Jewish men who matched the profile of elders, and directed the Hellenized Jewish Christians to organize themselves under these men. That these men then exhibited awe inspiring spiritual leadership simply shows elders are not confined to mere organizational service, any more than were the Apostles forbidden from governing.
The categories were flexible; they were not titles, but roles. A "deacon" (elder) on the road was an "apostle" (missionary) in effect. That's because the Spirit hardly conforms to even our best redeemed logic. The concerns of the Spirit are relentlessly other-worldly. From the concrete reality down to the most abstract intellectual conception, nothing in this realm of existence can rise to the level of the Spirit. Nothing on this plane of existence can ever be granted the reverence we owe God. Whatever it is here you devote fully to God remains "holy" only in the sense of symbolic ritual. It is only so "holy" as it reflects God's revelation at that particular moment, and even then, only in the hearts of those who can perceive it.
This is probably the hardest concept to convey to our fallen mortal minds: God is a Living God, and is found only in living beings here. It's the same principle with Scripture; it's only ink on paper. Once it comes life in some soul, then it becomes "the Word of God." Words on paper have no power of their own. If God is reflected in Creation, that works only in the soul of someone observing Creation with an awareness of God. We can tell people with dead spirits about the holiness of God, but they utterly lack the means to use it. You might as well be talking to a dog or a rock about holiness. It's not a matter of intellectual acumen, but spiritual awareness. Thus, a born-again idiot can get it when the lost genius cannot.
The only particular advantage humans have here over the rest of Creation is the potential for spiritual breakthrough. That is, while nothing you or I could do will bring life to dead spirits, we find God has promised to do so in connection with our committed and faithful service in His Spirit. He certainly has no trouble doing so without us, but has called us along side His mighty miraculous work of redemption for reasons we'll never quite comprehend.
If we ever get lost in the performance of bringing life to dead spirits, we will miss the point. We really have nothing to do with that. All we have before us is the task of living and acting by the promptings of the Spirit in our spirits. God never speaks to the mind; only to the spirit that lives. By His help, in varying degrees for which there is no measuring, we are able to respond to those ineffable promptings of the Spirit in our spirits. By an act of will (the biblical term is "heart") we remain steadfastly committed, and this itself is the only measure of holiness. The brain will never quite grasp it, but we remain committed to the "renewing of the mind" process whereby the intellect slowly adapts to the realization it will never make sense. Rather, the mind must be reconstructed to tolerate the uncertainty as the very foundation of righteous understanding, and to allow the spirit to rule from a divine logic too great and mighty for the brain. The thing to which we commit is not some ordered course of action, but simply to the on-going process of adaptation itself. We don't follow some law which produces some predictable result, except in the sense as a parable for something which is utterly unpredictable, utterly unknowable.
Sure, observe the Laws of God as best you can, but only as the frame of reference in which you wait on God to direct you otherwise. And not in the letter of the law, but in the best abstraction, since the Law of Moses was the specific application of the Laws of Noah for that people, in that place, at that time. The Covenant of Israel had a concrete beginning on Mount Sinai and a concrete end at the Cross. It remains to us an example which we are required to abstract for our own situation. That we cannot expect to do so with any degree of certainty should help us realize uncertainty is God's way. Only a fallen mind demands certainty; a redeemed heart seeks eternal dependence on the Father. Nothing on this earth, real or abstract, can substitute for Him.
A primary meaning behind the term "Christian Mysticism" is a personal, individual direct experience with God. Even Western Christianity professes some interest in that direct experience with God Almighty. But then it goes on to deny the very logical implications of it, by rejecting the way the people of the Bible lived according to that redeemed logic. We of the Tribulation Church seek to redeem logic itself, by pulling it back to the original logic inherent in the Bible.
We spare little concern for real estate, facilities, equipment, time, food, or even people in the mainstream sense. Our focus is on simply and individually regenerating from within what God had intended. We make no pretense of any possibility of ever getting to the end of such endeavor here on this earth. We strive to divorce our minds from concerns about measurable success, but we obediently commune with each other so we can seek that sense of oneness with Him. We love instinctively. Nor do we spare much concern with the measurable effects of this struggle, because that remains the work of God alone. An increase in the number of people involved is His gift to us, not our work for Him. Since we cannot ever really know whether some other person is spiritually alive, we don't even focus on that; we don't ask people to be born-again because no one but God can make that happen. There will always be that uncertainty, and we embrace it by dismissing even the pretense of such language.
We are the Tribulation Church because tribulation is the primary defining factor of the church's existence. It comes from living in this world utterly focused on the one above.
By Ed Hurst
02 March 2010
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